Connected Data has announced the third generation version of its 4-bay Drobo storage array. A completely new architecture along with USB 3.0 connectivity help make it “three times faster than the previous generation.” Speed is always a welcome upgrade, but the real crowd-pleaser in this announcement is that its MSRP has been chopped to $349, and previous generation Drobo owners are eligible for a $50 customer loyalty discount.

Current Drobo owners will find it easy to migrate their data to the new system because it’s also built on BeyondRAID technology:

The foundation that allows first and second generation Drobo customers to seamlessly upgrade to a new Drobo by simply removing the disk pack from their current Drobo, and moving it to their new one.

It also offers Apple users an easy way to limit the amount of space available to Time Machine. This prevents OS X from storing extremely old backups because it thinks it has access to the entire drive.

In my experience back in 2010, this company makes the most awful storage solutions with the worst customer support. Went through 2 of these and 10 drives in a couple of months. Been running a Lacie RAID since.